Op/Ed

Boys Are Smarter – Even Six-Year Olds Know That

Posted February 7, 2017, 08:55 am | Op-Ed

By
Florence Snyder

By age six, our daughters have internalized the
belief that they are not as smart as boys. Boys
think so, too. That works well for the
bipartisan coalition of Men Who Like Things The Way They
Are, but makes for “a pathological system that rewards
men for their incompetence while punishing women for
their competence to the detriment of everybody.”

TED-talker and professor of business psychology
Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic explains that “anywhere in
the world, men tend to think they are much smarter than
women.” By the time they’re out of high school, they
have a well-practiced knack for hiding insecurity in a
cloak of hubris decorated with charisma and charm that
is easily, and wrongly, confused with leadership
potential.

We can’t discern between confidence and competence,
Prof. Premuzic argues, no matter how many times our male
leaders fail us. There is “compelling scientific
evidence” that women are more likely to adopt strategies
that work, but they lack the talent for bragging,
bloviating, bullying and beer-drinking required to get
themselves into positions of real power.

Let’s not blame men for what they learned from their
mothers and mostly female kindergarten teachers. Let’s
not blame women, either. You can’t change 200,000 years
of evolutionary biology overnight.

Feminists have been around since biblical times,
making a difference here and there by whispering in the
ears of their fathers, sons, husbands, and bosses who
put them on the payroll to pretend they care what women
think about anything.

Criss Jami, a writer and millennial wise beyond his
years, observed that “Creative people are often found
either disagreeable or intimidating by mediocrities.”

That’s not likely to change in Dr. Premuzic’s
lifetime, no matter how much peer-reviewed and
beautifully expressed research he produces. You can’t
take human nature out of human nature. But you can call
things by their right name.